YURIYAN RETRIEVER has carved out a unique position in Japanese entertainment as a prize-winning comedian, Netflix star, voice actor, TV/radio personality and occasional rapper. The versatile entertainer is now adding solo recording artist to her long list of titles, kicking off her latest endeavor with a debut single called “YURIYAN TIME.” The catchy new track was co-written by yonkey, producer of ATARASHII GAKKO!’s hit singles “OTONABLUE” and “Suki Lie,” based on the things Yuriyan currently has to say or is angry about. The 34-year-old multi-hyphenate — whose stage name as a singer is stylized in all caps — has been based in the U.S. since last fall, and she chatted with Billboard Japan about her new single and future as an artist in this new interview.

First, tell us about your musical history. Did you always like listening to music?

Yes. When I was in elementary school, I dreamed of becoming a comedian someday, but also always wanted to join (J-pop girl group) Morning Musume. I have a sister who is two years older than me and used to borrow Avril Lavigne and Britney Spears CDs from her when I was in junior high. As soon as I got home from school, I’d spend time playing those CDs and looking at the lyrics on the liner notes. I lived in a rural area, so there was nowhere to go after extracurricular activities and my only pastime was to sing (at home).

I think the first CD I bought was Sum 41’s Chuck (2004). I thought they looked cool, so I bought it even though I didn’t know their songs. In high school, I was pretty much into (dance and vocal group) EXILE. I met someone I liked in my senior year and he loved EXILE. I wanted him to notice me, so I put a boombox in my bag and listened to EXILE during lunch time close to where he was hanging out.

I imagine the battle rap show Freestyle Teacher was also a turning point for you.

I’d never rapped before that show. [Japan’s top hip-hop artists coached participants with no prior rapping experience to eventually face off in freestyle.] I was in a street dance club in college, and hip-hop is my favorite genre. I like Morning Musume and J-pop and band music, but hip-hop in particular really gives me a boost. You can say what you want through rhymes, and be like, [says in English] “This is exactly what I wanna do!” It makes me stronger. Honestly, I like freestyle battling because my opponent will eventually forget what I said during a bout and by the time I get home, I never remember what they said, either.

Later on, I was invited to rap on Awich’s “Bad Bi*** Bigaku Remix.” When I was listening to the recording of the track on the Shinkansen bullet train, it was so soul stirring that my eyebrows began to rise and I found myself glaring at the people around me, like, “Just you wait and see, got that?” Even though everyone was just peacefully eating their lunches and stuff. [Laughs]

How did that eventually lead to your debut as a solo recording artist?

I often talk with my manager about what I want to become. I just say stuff without thinking at all about practicalities, so one day I said, “I want to be like Ariana Grande.” And my manager was like, “Let’s talk to Universal about that.” Then I found myself in a meeting with them, and yonkey agreed to work on a song with me and… My life is being assembled through low-key “Then we’ll help you be like that” “Cool, I’ll do it” turn of events, but it’s still hard to believe.

So things worked out quicker than you expected. What do you like so much about Ariana Grande?

Just hearing that Ariana is going to do something is exciting, isn’t it? I don’t want this to be like, “Oh, YURIYAN RETRIEVER (the comedian) is releasing a song.” I want people to know that there’s someone called YURIYAN RETRIEVER in this world. I remember talking about how it’d be great if YURIYAN’s existence would spread and she’s reimported back to Japan. I’m really happy that people recognize YURIYAN RETRIEVER as a comedian, but while that’s my foundation, I don’t want to set any limits. In the end, I want to become a genre called “Yuriyan Retriever.”

What thoughts went into “YURIYAN TIME”?

yonkey put together the thoughts and feelings that I sent him to make it into a song that introduces me. Like, “This is the kind of person I am, so shut your trap.” The message is, “People may say all kinds of things about me, but this is who I am so just shut up,” and yonkey expressed it in a pop, yet powerful way. I have fun singing it and it cheers me up.

The lyrics are full of things that have made me who I am today. For example, the word “bigaku” (aesthetics) comes from Awich’s “Bad Bi*** Bigaku Remix,” and my life changed a lot after playing the professional wrestler Dump Matsumoto in Netflix’s The Queen of Villains, so yonkey included her name. Also (physical trainer) Tomo Okabe, who helped me with my body building. I owe her my life. The song is really like a series of flashbacks of my life so far.

The way the song suddenly shifts to an enka-like melody [enka is a genre of Japanese popular ballads] is striking.

It was exciting how such a cool, uptempo song suddenly becomes enka-like and I was like, “yonkey, you’re too good!” It reminds me of Kill Bill in that it sounds like it’s joking but it’s being done in an exquisitely cool way, and I’m so pleased about that.

How do you feel now that you’ve made your debut as a solo recording artist?

I never imagined… I still find it hard to believe. I’d first like to thank the people at Universal Music Group for saying, “Let’s do it together” when I went to them and said something nuts like, “Excuse me, I want to be Ariana Grande.”

Right now, [says in English] “I’m in Los Angeles,” so I want to perform at Coachella! That’s a dream of mine, and I hope we can make it there together. I do want to be Ariana Grande, of course, but from now on I want to be like a circus, not someone who is like another person. I want to be a one-woman art collective, not just a comedian or a rapper. I’m not making sense anymore [Laughs], but I hope to be a fun person.

Your debut track is sung in Japanese, but considering you’re based in the U.S. now, can we expect to hear English songs from you in the future?

Kim Kardashian’s daughter North West raps in Japanese on a song she’s featured in, and I was like, “Maybe the Japanese language will become a trend.” I’m open to performing in English eventually, but since I’m in the U.S., I thought it’d be nice if people took interest in Japanese and tried to sing it. Like the way I wanted to sing Britney’s songs back in junior high although I didn’t understand what was written on the liner notes, it’d be great if people take interest in singing in Japanese even if they don’t understand it, because they find it cute and interesting, and the song is fun and cool.

Lastly, what kind of person would you say YURIYAN is?

I’d say she’s more than a handful. [Laughs]

This interview by Atsuo Nagahori first appeared on Billboard Japan.

On Thursday night (July 17), the U.S. House of Representatives voted to allow President Donald Trump to claw back $9 billion in federal funds, including $1.1 billion to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which funds the country’s more than 1,500 Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR) stations. The money had already been allocated to CPB for the next two budget years, but the bill cancels funds the CPB had expected to receive and that the stations were counting on. The Senate approved the rescissions on Wednesday (July 16).

The action has wide-ranging, potentially devastating effects, including on the arts programs PBS and NPR produce, including Austin City Limits (ACL). The longest-running music program in TV history is coming off its 50^th anniversary and for half a century has provided a vital and vigorous home for live performance, featuring music from all genres — Foo Fighters, Bonnie Raitt, Ray Charles, Coldplay, Billie Eilish, Pearl Jam, Dolly Parton, Kendrick Lamar and hundreds more.

“This is a kick in the gut, and it really does hurt,” says Terry Lickona, who has served as ACL’s executive producer since 1979. “This comes as a blow, not just for Austin City Limits, of course, but it’s a dark day for public media almost 60 years since [President Lyndon B. Johnson] signed public broadcasting into law.” (Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 in November of that year, creating the CPB, which gave “a stronger voice to educational radio and television by providing new funds for broadcast facilities,” Johnson said. “We want most of all to enrich man’s spirit. That is the purpose of this act.”)

Willie Nelson, who performed on the first episode of ACL in 1974, tells Billboard, “Austin City Limits and PBS were and are an essential part of education, understanding, curiosity and empathy, which are the essentials and building blocks of humanity.”

Austin’s local PBS station, known as Austin PBS, produces, funds and owns ACL. The station is expected to lose $3 million from the cuts, Lickona says.

It’s too soon to know how much of that loss of $3 million in federal funding will directly affect ACL, and the equation is further clouded by the fact that PBS Austin and ACL share many staffers. “But what’s important now, more than ever, is we are going to have to lean and lean hard on the support of people who’ve come to depend on our show,” says Lickona, who vows ACL will go on. “We’ve going to have to get that money from somewhere else.” (On average, PBS stations receive around 15% of their annual budgets from federal funding, according to the New York Times, with some stations in rural communities with fewer donor opportunities relying on the federal dollars for a much higher percentage.)

Lickona estimates that 25% of ACL’s operating budget relies on federal funding. For the 51^st season, which is already underway, the budget is around $4 million. This amount represents 20 artist tapings — funneled into 13 episodes —with a budget of around $200,000 per taping, which means ACL will likely need to make up at least $1 million.

This season is already at a budget deficit of $350,000, says Lickona, who has been looking for more underwriters to make up the shortfall. The task is made slightly more difficult because PBS limits the number of national underwriters a show can have, a rule Lickona hopes that PBS will consider changing, considering the federal funding loss.

Lickona is daunted but not deterred. “Nothing lasts 50 years without a lot of struggle and a lot of challenges, financial, political and otherwise,” he says. “We will carry on somehow, because too many people depend on Austin City Limits for these 50 years.”

In addition to funding from corporate and individual donors, ACL also receives money from a licensing agreement with Live Nation for the Austin City Limits festival and, starting last year, funds from the Texas Film Commission. Lickona is unsure what will happen with the state funding following the federal change. “We can’t count on anything as far as that state money goes,” he says.

For now, Lickona says there will be no major changes to ACL and its schedule. “There are no immediate plans to cut back or alter the program in any way, but we will need the continuous support of music lovers and sponsors now more than ever, as well as the support of artists, labels, publicists and managements to stand with us as they have for 50 years,” he says.

Some artists are already stepping up. Before the cuts were announced, Jason Isbell was slated to play an Aug. 21 private fundraiser for Austin PBS, and Lickona is hoping more will help raise funds. “We have done a lot to benefit artists’ careers over the years, and they totally get it and appreciate it, and I think we’re going to have to call upon their support,” he says.

Reba McEntire was among those who spoke out against the cuts prior to the Senate vote. On July 11, she posted to Instagram, “From my appearances on Austin City Limits in 1987 to South Pacific from Carnegie Hall in 2006, I’ve had a long relationship with PBS,” before calling on people to check out protectmypublicmedia.com to “help keep PBS delivering the incredible programming we all love so much.”  

Lickona doesn’t see ACL pairing with a streaming or cable outlet as PBS stalwart Sesame Street, which in 2015 partnered with HBO, and now Netflix, to premiere episodes before they ran on PBS. “Imagine me walking into the offices back in the day or even today of one of the commercial television networks or streaming services and pitching the idea for a weekly music show that one week might have Kendrick Lamar and the next Dolly Parton and the week after that Samara Joy,” he says. “It’s such an eclectic mix of all different artists, some well-known, some totally obscure and avant-garde. PBS is the only place that a show like ours could exist. We never could have survived in any sort of commercial environment where it’s more about the ratings and revenue.”

As for what Lickona would say to the lawmakers and the current administration that voted for the public broadcasting cuts, he simply says, “They don’t get it…They don’t understand the value that PBS, NPR and public media continue to serve like they have for almost 60 years. Even with a show like Austin City Limits, it goes so far beyond just providing a showcase for music from week to week.” On a broader scale, he mentions the numerous communities, many of them rural, where people don’t have access to or can’t afford subscription streaming services and other paid media.   

“I remember Alan Jackson telling me that he grew up in some rural town in Georgia where they didn’t have any sort of cable TV, and he watched Austin City Limits and saw George Jones and Willie Nelson and people like that, and that inspired him to want to become a country singer,” Lickona continues. “The impact that shows like Sesame Street and the nature programming and public affairs programming have had…It just says to me that the people in Washington, from the White House through Congress, just don’t get it. They don’t understand the value that so many other millions of people have understood and benefited from for all these years.”

U.K. police have announced that Irish rap group Kneecap will not be criminally charged for shouting “Free Palestine” and “‘F— Keir Starmer” during its politically-charged Glastonbury Festival set last month.

Avon and Somerset Police said in a Friday (July 18) update that they’ve closed a previously announced investigation into Kneecap’s packed June 28 set at Glastonbury’s West Holts Stage.

“Detectives sought advice from the Crown Prosecution Service during their enquiries and after that advice, we have made the decision to take no further action on the grounds there is insufficient evidence to provide a realistic prospect of conviction for any offence,” the police update reads.

Authorities in Avon and Somerset are continuing to investigate fiery remarks made during Bob Vylan’s June 29 Glastonbury set, in which frontman Bobby Vylan (Pascal Robinson-Foster) chanted “death to the IDF,” a reference to the Israeli Defense Forces.

Meanwhile, Kneecap MC Mo Chara (Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh) still faces a terror charge for a separate show at London’s O2 Forum in November. Video footage from that performance showed Mo Chara shouting “up Hamas, up Hezbollah” and displaying a Hezbollah flag.

Kneecap appeared to allude to these other open matters in a statement reacting to the news of the closed Glastonbury investigation on Friday, writing on the group’s official social media pages, “One element of the political policing intimidation attempt is over.”

“We played a historic set at Glastonbury,” reads Kneecap’s statement. “Every single person who saw our set knew no law was broken, not even close….yet the police saw fit to publicly announce they were opening an investigation.”

 “This is political. This is targeted. This is state intimidation,” the group’s statement continued. “We will continue to fight. We will continue to win.”

The band that sings about having too much time on its hands has been using it wisely in recent years. Circling From Above, out Friday (July 18), is Styx‘s 18th studio album and third in seven years.

What’s driving the group’s output? “Well, we’re always writing,” singer-guitarist Tommy Shaw, Styx’s most prolific composer (alongside former member Dennis DeYoung), tells Billboard during the group’s current Brotherhood of Rock Tour with the Kevin Cronin Band and former Eagles guitarist Don Felder. There’s also a strong partnership with Will Evankovich, who produced 2017’s The Mission, 2021’s Crash of the Crown and this year’s Circling From Above (he became a full-fledged member of the band in 2021).

“Will and I live close to each other (in Nashville),” Shaw continues, “so we get together a lot and co-write things. But the other guys are great co-writers, too; we’ll get together at my house or at Will’s studio and we’ll start cobbling these pieces together…. Somehow, luckily, we’ve always been able to bring these songs and pieces together and tell a story, and that’s the best thing.”

The California-born Evankovich, who first worked with Shaw on his mid-90s Shaw Blades project with Night Ranger’s Jack Blades, adds that all of the Styx albums he’s been involved with “basically happen organically. There’s stuff Tommy and I were writing at first, and then involving Lawrence (Gowan, singer/keyboardist), they just took off on its own. It wasn’t premeditated. Tommy’s always writing; he’s a very creative guy, and I think finding a new writing partner galvanized his interest. But we do it because we want to do it, not because of how many records we’re gonna sell.”

While there were certainly thematic threads within The Mission and Crash of the Crown, both Shaw and Evankovich are quick to downplay any notions of Circling From Above as a concept album. “No, we’re not trying to make a concept album,” Shaw explains. “We’re just trying to stay on the same track. That’s what interests us, to make it interesting to the person listening to it and tying it all together like that. I think that’s fun.”

Circling From Above does start from a specific idea, however. Shaw — whose avid interest in birds helped put a European starling on the album cover — says the Pink Floyd-esque title track, which slides into the equally proggy first single “Build and Destroy,” was inspired by a continuing interest in outer space. “There’s an app I discovered a while back where you can look up and see all the space junk,” he says. “It blew my mind that all this stuff is floating around up there. Every piece of equipment that’s up there, that’s basically junk, is owned by a country and that country knows where it is and is responsible for it. It’s organized chaos, but it’s a junkyard up there. As we discussed it in the studio we were getting ready to write songs, and that influenced some of the lyrics and ideas kept popping off and we had those two songs that go together.”

Evankovich says the other 11 tracks on Circling From Above are not as interdependent. “Pretty much after that (the album) is its own animal,” he explains. “It becomes like a Beatles’ Rubber Soul, where every song’s a little different.” But, as producer, he sought to create a sonic unity in applying elements of what can be considered classic Styx, helping the band sound more like its rock radio-dominating ‘70s and ‘80s era than it had for a number of years.

“The recipe has always been big harmonies, these car horn-stacked vocals, and the great synthesizers and guitars, and we still adhere pretty much to that recipe,” Evankovich says of the band, which has placed 23 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (including eight top 10s and one No. 1) over the course of its career. “None of it is premeditated; it just kind of falls into the Styx universe by virtue of the fact you have James Young and Chuck Panozzo (co-founders) and Tommy Shaw in addition to the new guard, which is Gowan, Todd Sucherman (drums) Terry (Gowan, bass) and myself.

“When they took that hiatus from Cyclorama, the record industry was in a state of flux and things were a little confusing about selling new music, especially if you’re a vintage band. So these (recent albums) have kind of merged the two; we’re at an age now where the attention span is pretty quick, so we try to compact all the greatness that we can into three- or four-minute songs rather than do those longer, stretched-out songs — which I love, by the way. But this is the mantra now.”

Shaw and Evankovich say Circling From Above is definitely a full-band project — even more than Crash of the Crown, which was conceived and finished during Covid. “When JY plays, you know who it is,” Shaw notes. “Will knows JY (James Young) very well and he knows JY’s style of playing and the types of things that we depend on JY to put into a song, because they’re signature things.” Young makes his mark in particular on the fluid solo for the bouncy, theatrical “King of Love.”

“What’s great is we’re always thinking of each other,” Evankovich says. “We have in our minds that, ‘This is gonna be a great JY guitar solo, this is definitely his vibe,’ or ‘This is a great Tommy spot.’ The song will tell you who we should we feature, and we all want to lift each other up.” Terry Gowan, who had been playing with his brother before being tapped to replace Ricky Phillips after his departure in 2024, added upright bass to the mix on “Blue Eyed Raven” (with Shaw on mandolin) while Panozzo played on the short interlude track “Ease Your Mind.”

With Styx playing 1977’s triple-platinum The Grand Illusion in its entirety this summer, the group has only been able to work “Build and Destroy” into its live set to date. But it’s looking forward to adding more of the Circling From Above songs into dates later this year, including the Rockin’ in Paradise Cruise during October. “We’ll definitely get to that as soon as August is over,” Evankovich says. “People come to see the great catalog of music the band has, but I think by September we’ll probably work a few new ones in there, probably two or three once we’ve cycled the Grand Illusion album.”

While Circling From Above is just out, the idea of another album is not far from the Styx members’ minds. “It’ll just take an amassing of songs, like it did for The Mission and for Crash of the Crown and for this album,” Evankovich says. “Once there’s three or four and we’ve got a thread going, then we start. It takes a few years because we’re playing 100 shows a year and away from home about 170 days out of the year, so finding the time is always challenging. But it always seems to happen, and I’m confident it probably will again.”